all do,” I said.
If Ron Martin wanted to be a former gag writer for Milton Berle, then he was. The islands are filled with people who reinvented their pasts. Whatever he once was, and maybe that included writing gags for Berle, now he ran a damn good inn, and he had built it himself brick by brick. The lobby was filled with huge framed black and white posters of Milton Berle in every kind of imaginable costume. Milton Berle as Queen Victoria. Milton Berle as Harpo Marx. Milton Berle as a giant chicken. Milton Berle as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, George Armstrong Custer with a hundred phony arrows sticking out of the costume. There were shots of Milton Berle as anything but Milton Berle. Ron Martin claimed he was the mastermind behind Berle’s costume gags. Now he ran a weekly comedy night during high season in the inn’s lounge, known from Puerto Rico to Trinidad as an excellent training ground for aspiring stand up comics.
Chance pulled the Land Rover into the circular drive in front of Smugglers Inn. Yellow lights lined the way, throwing soft shadows of century plants, palms and lime trees over the closely cropped lawn. The night sky was clear; the stars bright, the moonlight a shimmering silver glaze over the landscape.
Ron met the car by the front door. He opened the passenger’s side door as we moved slowly and I jumped to the ground the moment we came to a stop. He helped Liz from the seat as I grabbed her bag from the back. I walked with them to the front of the inn.
“Maybe I’ll see you again.” I touched her shoulder as she stood in the doorway. “Here’s my card. Give me a ring if you feel like a good dinner some evening while you’re on island, or if you feel like having a good talk you can call me for that too, or both. A good meal and excellent conversation can be very therapeutic, you know.”
“Thanks.” Standing outlined by the lights in the lobby, she read the card aloud. “Frank James, poet/private investigator. You’re a private detective?”
I shrugged. “I do some investigations. It’s mostly little stuff, looking for kids who’ve been kidnapped by one parent and brought down to the Caribbean so the other parent can’t find them, things like that. Sometimes it gets a little heavier, but I don’t get much work down here. It’s a hobby as much as it is a job. Besides, it’s all under the table. The Ursuline authorities would never give a non-islander a permit to work as a private eye.”
“Who knows, maybe I’ll hire you,” she laughed. Then, giving us each a final handshake, she said goodnight and disappeared into Smugglers Inn, followed by Ron and her bag.
“Class act,” Chance said.
“Yeah.” I stretched my legs under the glove compartment, pushing the full weight of my body against the seat. Sliding my hand along the cushion, I could feel the warmth of the spot where Liz had been sitting. I pulled it back, lightly slapping my knees. I saw the signs and wasn’t about to get caught up in one of my self-pitying loneliness jags.
Back on the road we continued along the sea wall, wind blasting our faces. I picked up my habit of driving rental Jeeps with the windshield down from riding in Chance’s Land Rover. The only time he raises it is during a storm. It’s his sole protection from the rain. I keep telling him to carry an umbrella, cardboard boxes, anything his passengers could use to shield themselves from rainstorms. He refuses. He enjoys stopping, putting up the windshield, and continuing his drive, pretending the rain doesn’t bother him while his passengers get drenched, complaining at the same time they marvel at his seeming indifference to both their discomfort and his own drenching.
“She really turned you on,” he said.
“She’s an attractive woman.” I dropped it there. I don’t talk about women with other men, even a good a friend like Chance. Besides, I didn’t want to think about Liz Ford. From the time she approached me by the ladder on the upper deck of The Yellow Bird, to the firmness of her handshake as she said goodnight, I had been hoping for something other than spending the evening with Chance. Sighing again, I stretched my legs, resting my hands behind my head.
Chance broke the silence. “I’ll go to dinner with you.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Day or night, the road from Smugglers Bay to St. Ursula’s main town of Chaucer is one of the loveliest drives in the world. To the south is the Caribbean, its blue/green expanse broken only by the three small rises of Queen Anne Island, Jacobs Cay and Pirates Nemesis, a barren thrust of stone surrounded by coral reefs, accessible only by rowboat. Local legend says plundered gold is buried on Pirate’s Nemesis. If there ever was it has long since been found and secreted somewhere else. Not an inch of ground remains that hasn’t been dug up and turned over repeatedly by treasure seekers. In spite of that, it’s a favorite haunt of middle-aged tourists with metal detectors, who, after hours of prospecting, end up finding nothing more than one another’s lost dimes and quarters.
The sea is separated from the road by a wall of rock, chunks of coral and brick mortared together in the fashion of the old sugar mills, once the core of St. Ursula’s plantation economy. Waves broke against the stone, their spray covering the road, the Land Rover and us. In heavy storms the sea will eat sections of the road as it breaks through the wall, sending chunks of rock and asphalt crashing against the foot of the mountains which run the length of the island, separating the north from the south side. Roads twist and wind over those mountains, past huge century plants, hibiscus and oleander, banana plantations, grazed fields, and occasional houses. Cars have to compete for space with cows, donkeys, goats, chickens, as well as with people walking, bicycling and riding donkeys.
This particular night the moon, nearly full, caught the breaking waves, lighting the foam as it swirled around the rocks. Lights twinkled from the Paradise Isle Hotel and Yacht Harbor on Queen Anne Island.
I reached into the ice chest Chance keeps in the back of the Land Rover and grabbed us each a Heineken. I pulled the tabs and passed him one.
“Bad stuff,” I said as he took the can.
“I love beer,” he said.
“Not the beer, the cans. You ought to buy bottled beer. I’ve heard that cans are made with aluminum might do more damage to your brain than the alcohol.”
“Then here’s to beer, in cans and bottles.” He raised the can to his lips. “I don’t think much of my brain anyway. It gets me in more trouble than my pecker does.”
Halfway between Smugglers Bay and the Great Harbor of Chaucer, the road curves sharply around Pelican Cove. There, in a small valley at the base of Wise Mountain, sits a small cluster of West Indian homes, the road separated from the sea by thick mangroves, the nesting place of the pelicans for which Pelican Cove is named.
A dozen or so men, all dressed in dungarees and tee shirts, lounged around the common well, leaning against the fence, sitting on benches as they smoked cigarettes and drank from a rum bottle they passed around. Chance pulled over and stopped.
“Good evening. How are you tonight?” He spoke in the formal Ursuline manner.
“Chance, mon, and Frank,” several of them said at once. “We are just fine you know, and you?”
“Absolutely wonderful, thank you,” he said as I made the okay sign with my thumb and forefinger.
We got out of the car. Chance hunkered down by the benches. I sat on the edge of the well. We all talked a bit, passing time, Chance and I drinking from the rum bottle as it made the rounds. There was the general light unease often present as Statesiders and West Indians grope for common ground,
